Jenni Romaniuk: don't trust me, trust science. It leads to smarter decisions

The correct measurement of brand health is one of the most valuable tools for marketers, emphasized Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM (43/2023) , which took place shortly after her presentation at the Brand Management 2023 conference. As a New Year's gift, a conversation with a professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of the expert bestsellers How Brands Grow — Part 2, Building Distinctive Brand Assets and last year's news Better Brand Health, we present it in full.

In 2019, when you performed in Prague for the first time, you spoke about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

This time you focused on measuring the health of brands, about which you published a publication this year. Can you introduce your work?
Anyone involved in monitoring brand health wants to understand why to do it and how to do it right. For years, people have told me that measurement frustrates them. They don't like how it works and see no use for it. So the goal is to make the most of what is often one of the biggest spenders in a marketer's research budget. Because when done right, it can be one of the most valuable tools at their disposal.

As I understand it, you are trying to get into the minds of the shoppers. It is so?
It's about understanding whether you've laid the right foundation so that the next time someone is in a buying situation, they're more likely to consider your brand. And in addition to knowing how to measure these basics and how to interpret the obtained data.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Jenni Romaniuk: properly measuring brand health is one of the most valuable tools

Don't believe me, trust science - it leads to smarter decisions, says Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM. A professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and a leading expert on brand value spoke at the Brand Management conference after four years.

In 2019, you spoke in Prague about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Posted on October 25, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Romaniuk’s new book merits attention

The old chestnut that marketing departments know that half their marketing communications budget works, but not which half, is thankfully long dead and buried. Its demise helped by pioneering studies of how advertising works by JWT in 1960’s London; built on by planners like Alan Hedges and later Paul Feldwick in later decades; with newer critical insights from Les Binet and Peter Field.

Studies from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reported on by the redoubtable Professor Byron Sharp have also helped immeasurably. Sharp’s blockbuster 2012 publication, How Brands Grow, has gone into numerous editions and achieved best-seller status. He postulated a series of ‘laws’ for marketing managers; salience rather than positioning, distinctiveness rather than differentiation.

Sharp also addressed reaching not teaching, continuous activity rather than bursts. He had the audacity to nobble one of the longest established icons of marketing practice; USP in favour of making relevant associations and building memory structures. Like another messiah 2,000 years earlier he then encapsulated his commandments down to two; mental availability and physical availability.

One suspects the professor would have approved of the comparison. Sharp’s capacity for pithy phrasemaking and flair for communication means that his main conclusions are now widely shared across the business. Inevitably, some of his pronouncements have attracted criticism, particularly from fellow academics who can often make ground hurling look tame.

Sharp’s tendency to dismiss niche brands as small brands that lack the ambition to be more successful has been effectively rebutted in several case studies. Since the initial publication of How Brands Grow 11 years ago, there has been a steady stream of publications expanding on the initial thesis. The publications collectively represent a comprehensive guide to successful brand management.

How Brands Grow Part 2 appeared in 2014 with Sharp joined by Dr Jenni Romaniuk, also a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in South Australia. Four years later, she published Building Distinctive Brand Assets, an expanded thesis on one of the key components of a successful brand; colour, logos, copy lines, symbols, characters, visual and verbal tone.

Faults

Romaniuk has now written a new book covering another critical area of brand management (measurement) entitled Better Brand Health; Measure & Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The self-confident approach of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is evident from the preface where the author wastes no time in outlining the faults of most current brand tracking studies.

The faults are explained under three headings: philosophy, fads, fear. Determining that they adopt the wrong philosophy by concentrating on heavy and loyal buyers; the E-B academics have tended to focus on low level or non-buyers as they are key to future growth. Romaniuk  is also critical of ‘fads’; that is adding new measures for the hell of it, leading to ‘fear’ of dropping measures.

The measures have a tendency to become superfluous, resulting in bloated questionnaires. The author then reminds us of the three most important ‘laws’ of brand growth which form a backdrop to the book; brands grow by adding new buyers all the time, all brand buyer profiles are similar, and your brand’s main competitors are the biggest brands in the category.

Read the full article on Marketing.ie.

Posted on September 8, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Jenni Romaniuk: "The priority is to increase the customer base"

Great turnout at Boussias Events' How Brands Grow

With a large participation of executives from the field of marketing and branding, Boussias Events' "How Brands Grow" took place yesterday, June 15, with keynote speaker Jenni Romaniuk, distinguished author, researcher, professor and International Director of the world's No. 1 research organization for brand management, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia.

In her first meeting with the Greek public, Romaniuk argued for the priority that should be given to increasing a brand's customer base over aiming to increase customer loyalty.

Building loyal buyers or targeting specific, niche market audiences may seem like logical decisions, however, data shows that as tactics they do not enhance brand growth. He also emphasized that since the goal is to grow the customer base, the means is to reach as many people as possible.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

In Clear Focus

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk, May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They discuss how brands grow and why small brands should adjust expectations when assessing brand metrics.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk (Part 2), May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They dive deeper into unpacking the key concepts for understanding and improving brand health.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia: How do brands grow?

The application of evidence-based marketing can leave room for what really has value for the development of a brand. However, it takes courage from marketers to question even their own assumptions, which until now have defined their actions. After all, does one need to worry about brand rejection when one has not calculated Mental Availability? Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute provides guidance.

Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of the University of South Australia, is coming to Greece for the first time, on June 15, as a keynote speaker at How Brands Grow, to present to marketeers and advertisers of the Greek market updated research data on braning, as well as her recently published book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The book is the "natural" continuation of the successful "How Brands Grow Part 2 – Revised!", which he co-authored with Byron Sharp, Professor and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of the best seller "How Brands Grow: What marketers do I don't know". Shortly before her speech, she shares with MW readers useful insights on the value of brands, Mental Availability.

MW: How can evidence-based marketing be applied and what are its results?

Jenni Romaniuk: Applying evidence-based marketing highlights the areas we need to prioritize and identifies those areas we could ignore or leave further behind. In a world of limited time and often data overload, having clear priorities helps improve our efficiency. Leverage evidence-based marketing to create a framework for core efforts. The framework helps us choose the metrics and results we need to check to determine if our brand is on track. Eliminating signs that can distract us is also very helpful. Efforts to create more loyal buyers or target more specific market segments may seem logical, however there is evidence that as tactics they do not enhance brand development. This means we can shift our efforts away from ineffective ideas that simply drain our time and budget. Therefore, by applying evidence-based marketing, we are able to use our resources more effectively.

Can you explain the Laws of Brand Growth to us?

Similar to the laws of Physics, there are several Laws of Brand Development. One of the most important is the Law of Double Jeopardy. This law states that small brands "suffer" doubly. Smaller brands have fewer buyers (first risk), who are slightly less loyal (second risk), compared to buyers of larger brands. Other laws, such as Similar Buyer Profiles, highlight how brands compete, while the Natural Monopoly Law focuses on the core advantage of big brands, which is known to people who know little about the category.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Jenni Romaniuk on better brand health

The Ehrenberg-Bass professor explains the principles and pitfalls of brand health tracking.

When it came time for Jenni Romaniuk, international director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, to write a new book, she thought about Adam Grant.

Romaniuk had heard the popular science author say that before he decides to write about something he asks himself whether he’d be happy talking about it for the next two years, and she thought: ‘Okay, that’s a good criteria.’

That is not the only reason that Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World exists, of course. For another thing, Romaniuk was eminently qualified to write the book. Maybe even uniquely so. She is one of the world’s foremost experts on brand growth and distinctive assets, and she has spent a decade both practising and studying brand health tracking.

With one foot in the private sector and the other in academia, Romaniuk could get to grips with the pointy end of brand health tracking – designing questionnaires for companies, analysing results, etc – and then direct research to fill in the gaps whenever she was unsatisfied with the level of knowledge.

Better Brand Health brings together Romaniuk’s practical insights and research findings and grounds them within the established framework of brand growth to create a comprehensive guide to measuring people’s attitudes and memories. 

We spoke to her about some of the core concepts in her book, and some of the ways that marketers get it wrong when they set out to measure brand health.

Let’s start off simple. What are brand health metrics?

Brand health metrics are where we try to capture what effect we've had on a category by memories. There’s a whole range of different metrics under that umbrella, but it’s all about getting a window into the category and how what’s been going on in the marketplace has changed how people think and feel about brands. So brand health metrics, in the broadest sense, are anything dealing with memory.

One of the things you set out early on in the book is the mantra, ‘design for the category, analyse for the buyer, report for the brand’. Can you explain what that means and why it's important?

Basically, it points to three of the things that people get wrong or misunderstand.

‘Design for the category’ means you should have a brand-health tracker that any brand in your category would be happy to use. It shouldn't be just about you. If another brand in the category, whether it's a bigger brand or a smaller brand, would not use it, then you’ve got biased measurement. You don’t want that because you don’t know where your brand is going to be in the future. You might be a big brand now, but imagine you launch another brand in the category – then you’ve got to look at it through a small lens, and you’re going to have to design a totally new tracker and that seems a bit counterproductive, particularly when we know how brands compete. Your biggest competitors are the bigger brands.

‘Analyse for the buyer’. It's amazing how often people will ask for cuts by gender, age, life cycle, economic state, and not realise that the differences between them are trivial. Most of those differences are actually driven by the number of buyers or non-buyers of the brand you have in that segment.

Read the full article in Contagious.

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Nils Andersson Wimby: Better Brand Health – reading candy for those already brand-savage

“People don't care about brands or advertising. That insight is proven in research. What I really like about this book is that it takes its starting point in that insight, and then applies it to the measurement of marketing," writes Nils Andersson Wimby.

In recent years, trends around how to measure the effect of marketing have been characterized by digital metrics and real-time data. But "what gets measured gets done", and the focus on tactical, digital and rapid optimization has led to a short-term focus and poorer effectiveness of marketing, as shown in studies by e.g. Binet & Field.

Because while the dashboard-driven, detailed and mobile measurement of tactical/digital communication has developed strongly, little focus has been placed on developing the long-term measurement methodology. Brand Tracking has continued to do well with measurements of awareness, consideration and a couple of casually selected brand attributes. Sluggish, expensive and boring and unfashionable, the uninitiated thought. But nothing could be further from the truth, this is the measurement that is clearly linked to long-term value creation, which looks beyond clicks and conversions and aims at market shares and reduced price elasticity .

When Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute now releases a book about how to fine-tune your measurement to match the research from "How Brands Grow", then brand geeks breathe a sigh of relief. Build Better Brands promises just this: A handbook on how to translate the knowledge of Mental and Physical Avaliability into measurement methodology.

Read the full article on Resume.

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Insight Rockstars

Better Brand Insights – by Jenni Romaniuk, March 2023

“I think a lot of brand trackers are not fit for purpose in that they were designed in an era where the loyal/ heavy buyer was the person we were most interest in”. Professor Jenni Romaniuk and Insight Rockstars host, Frank Buckler discuss brand trackers and why they are important.

Listen to the full podcast episode on Apple, Spotify & Google Podcasts.

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Increasing mental market share by using category entry points

Customer question

Our client, a global FMCG manufacturer in personal care, was looking for ways to further develop the brand and increase market share. In this  nominated  case study for a personal care brand, category entry points are examined to find brackets to increase mental market share. Byron Sharp's idea of ​​mental availability, which together with physical availability is responsible for brand growth, plays an important role in this.

Category entry points as building blocks of mental availability

DVJ Insights developed an approach based on the academic work of Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. She provided an empirically proven model to measure mental market share. The building blocks of mental availability are the Category Entry Points (CEPs) – situations and moments when consumers think of certain products and brands. Consider, for example, the moment of using a body lotion: always after a shower or when the skin feels dry. If a consumer positively associates a specific CEP with the brand, this stimulates purchasing behaviour. So understanding CEPs offers concrete opportunities for brand growth by linking products to relevant situations and 'occasions'.

Approach and result

In order to detect as many growth opportunities as possible, the research was conducted in two phases. In phase 1, the current category entry points of various product categories of the brand and of the competition were mapped out with the aid of storytelling . This provides insight into when consumers use a product, why, in what context, for what purpose, et cetera. Using AI modeling, the most important CEPs per category were identified from all consumer stories. In phase 2, the frequency and mental market share of each CEP was then determined. This provides insight into where the customer's (or competitor's) brands are under- or over-performing and ultimately which CEPs are most promising for brand growth.  

Read the full article on Adformatie.

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown

Humans are hardwired to fear rejection.

To understand why, transport yourself to prehistoric times.

Imagine you are a caveman living in the year 10,000 BC and you commit a social faux pas against the caveman next door. Word gets out, and suddenly no one in the tribe wants to share their roasted sabretooth tiger with you. Without the support of the group, you can no longer feed yourself, and before you know it, you are starved out of the gene pool.

Modern Homo sapiens inherited this ancient fear of rejection, which is why we’re still alive.

Modern B2B companies struggle with something similar – fear of ‘brand rejection’.

Marketers fear we might say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and catastrophically harm the business. We often see this in advertising. Brands will pause media campaigns during turbulent times or dull down creative, trying to ensure we don’t insult any potential buyers and find ourselves starved out of a customer base.

But is the fear of brand rejection warranted?

Spoiler alert: not really.

Just like fear of rejection prevents too many people from reaching their full potential, fear of brand rejection prevents too many B2B businesses from reaching their full potential.

Have no fear, rejection is rare

Many B2B marketers worry about brand rejection. We track negative sentiment. We go dark during dark times. Sometimes we even run campaigns to address specific criticisms and try to win over our ‘detractors’ or win back our ‘churners’.

Almost all these decisions come from the gut.

We’d all be better off if these decisions came from the data instead.

And for the data, we turn to Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the patron saint of marketing rationalism, who recently published a paper with The B2B Institute entitled – wait for it…’Brand Rejection in B2B’.

The B2B Brand Rejection paper quantifies the answer to a simple question: how serious is brand rejection in B2B? Please allow us to summarise the findings.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

How to avoid taking a knife to a gun fight! Tips to build a strong service brand identity

Think about the last time you bought a chocolate bar, that moment you saw it on the shelf. You can probably remember how that chocolate bar looked, the colours, patterns, images on the pack, its weight in your hand before you tore open the wrapper, and its smell and taste as you put it in your mouth. All of this engagement of the senses helps refresh existing brand memories, and on occasion, build new ones.

Now compare that experience to the last time you renewed your car insurance –what happened? You received an email, letter or even text informing you it was due, pressed a few buttons on your phone or computer and then? Perhaps a vague sense of security, the mild accomplishment of a task ticked off the to-do list…but really, nothing to engage the senses, no adding to the reservoir of experiences that creates a memorable brand. This is the challenge services brands face in the battle to build brand memories.

The service sector is growing and shows no sign of abating. While the sector includes traditional service industries such as insurance or telecommunications, growth in the digital world means new services have emerged in every realm from health and fitness, education, safety/privacy, and entertainment. With the world becoming more interconnected, offering a service that can be accessed at the press of a few buttons can allow a brand to reach many more buyers all over the world. For example, Peloton can reach many more people with its fitness app than it can with its bike. Setting up stores is expensive and sending products is difficult, these activities put us at the mercy of logistics, and increase our carbon footprint. So long live growth in the services sector!

However, this servicisation of the world does have its challenges, and one such challenge is to build a strong brand identity when the primary offering is a service. Unfortunately, being a service in branding is like taking a knife to an (attention) gun fight. You have a weakened toolkit because you don’t have a physical product to show, that buyers can see, hold, or even trip over. Yes, your competitors are similarly handicapped, but it’s not just competitor brands that you fight when building brand identity. Obstacles to overcome also include environmental and mental clutter, which can render your brand a wallflower unless you find some way to stand out.

Building Distinctive Assets can help overcome service brand limitations. Here are some tips to help a service brand become a strong, distinctive brand in the minds of category buyers.

Read the full article on WARC.

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

"No one gives off*** about your brand"

I went to the Festival of Marketing, edition 2022. Good news: it was about marketing again. Bad news: we're fucked.

Last time I visited the Festival of Marketing in London (March 2022) I missed the marketing. It was the edge of the corona period and half of the presentations were about culture, team and mental health. All important, but it didn't have much to do with marketing. And if it was about marketing, then it was about the P for Promotion, so about tactics.

This year was different: back to basics

This edition (October 2022) was different. It was about marketing, entrepreneurship, market orientation, brand building and sales activation. It was about the long and short term, about effectiveness and efficiency and about the collaboration of marketing with other disciplines. Marketing in other words, and in fact the basis of marketing.

That can hardly be otherwise if you kick off with a presentation by marketing professor Mark Ritson. The essence of his speech was: 'No one gives a fuck about your brand'. More nuanced: Marketers think too little from the customer's perspective. A second theme in his speech was rising inflation and declining spending. In Ritson's words: 'We are fucked'.

Then add that the best way to deal with the current economic situation is to maintain budgets and marketing communication activities. A statement that he substantiated with an argument about the importance of share of voice and the creation of extra share of voice, resulting in a larger market share. If all brands follow his advice, then of course nothing will happen, but the practice is that many brands reduce their budgets and reduce advertising activities. Keep doing what you already planned, and your share of voice will grow.

Ritson ended his presentation with his marketing checklist:

  • Stay market-oriented (but actually: finally put yourself in your damn customer's shoes!)

  • Keep strategy simple (objectives, targeting, positioning)

  • Combine sales activation with brand building (the long & the short)

  • Pay attention to differentiation and distinctiveness. Be different, but above all striking and recognisably different

  • Keep your communication budget on track.

Plan B and C

Another interesting session was the conversation with the CMO and the CFO of On the beach, an online travel company (onthebeach.co.uk). The theme: How do I ensure an optimal relationship with the CFO? Crux of the whole story: talk to each other… That sounds a bit silly, but these two people had a healthy professional relationship. They had clear and shared strategic frameworks, spoke to each other regularly without an agenda and the CMO felt co-responsible for the P&L. The CMO left the nerdy marketing shizzle to the team and spoke to the CFO about goals (in terms of increasing average shopping cart sales and market share) and how she was going to achieve them. No, not all that complicated, but apparently (and that is also my own experience with the companies I see inside) a huge challenge. Organizations still work in silos. One of the take-aways from the conversation for me was the CFO's advice: Come up with a plan B and a plan C. If things go better than expected, what do we do? And if things go down, what's the plan? The first thing in particular, being prepared for success and being able to scale when needed, seems like a good idea to me.

Heinz

An engaging group discussion was about Heinz and was held with the marketer and the agency side team working on Heinz. The conversation itself wasn't all that interesting. It was about the heritage of the brand and how they are now building on it. So with respect for the past, but with a new impulse for the future.

What was interesting is that Heinz has an innovation team that does nothing but come up with new product ideas. Beanz burgers, Beanz meals, Beanz filled hash browns. So a lot with beans, because Beanz means Heinz. But that has now been supplemented with a new 'platform' (…) Beanz means more. Still less strong I think.

This only works from a holistic approach. You can come up with nice Saucysauce and Spaghetti Junction, but you still have to produce, sell and put them away through your distribution channels. This is only possible if the entire organization is willing to think in that direction and cooperate. That is not the case from a company with silos.

What I had some difficulty with was the role that Heinz appropriates from his new 'platform' in the problem of children who go to school without breakfast. A campaign is calling on people to donate £5 a month so that one child can have a decent breakfast. Heinz doubles every donation. To me that feels more like a clever advertising campaign than a company doing it right. Difficult to find the right balance.

Champagne

I was looking forward to the session with Jenni Romaniuk. Not because it was mainly about champagne, that too, but mainly because I think that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is an important voice in the marketing landscape and that their theory about brand growth and the role of distinctive brand assets is important. is to take note of. For anyone who works for brands: Romaniuk outlined her 'laws for growth' system (see image).

That system revolves around mental and physical availability and the specific interpretation thereof on various factors. In the session she discussed the meaning of category entry points, the entrances to the brand. Many brands assume inputs that are obvious, but what happens when those inputs change? And what do you do if this changes the competitive field? Is the way in which you present your product still adequate? With a different theme and in different terms, it was again about the customer's perspective. And once again it turned out that organizations and brands deal with this too easily.

Read the full article on Marketingfacts.


Posted on October 14, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Principles of Brand Growth: Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass – (English)

Markenkraft

My guest today is Professor Jenni Romaniuk. Jenni is Associate Director of the world famous Ehrenberg Bass Institute of the University of South Australia. She is a Research Professor and author of two very influential books “How Brands Grow Part 2” and “Building distinctive Brand Assets and one of the leading researchers on brand equity, advertising effectiveness, distinctive brand assets, word of mouth, loyalty and brand growth. She pioneered Mental Availability measurement and metrics. Jenni was the Executive Editor of the Journal of Advertising Research and now sits on the journal’s Senior Advisory Board.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Posted on August 26, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.